


A Selkie Story

by Black_Tea_and_Bones



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, F/F, Human Kara Danvers, Selkie Lena Luthor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:21:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26323303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Black_Tea_and_Bones/pseuds/Black_Tea_and_Bones
Summary: It's been a long time since Kara visited her late parent's cottage on the Irish sea. Unable to shake the feeling that something is missing in her life, she decides a little trip to the beach is just what she needs to figure it out, but an unexpected accident and an impossible rescue bring an unusual stranger into her life. Just who is this woman?  Where did she come from?  how does she know Kara, and why does she seem so familiar...?
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 42
Kudos: 459





	A Selkie Story

**Author's Note:**

> This little story was originally published in the 2020 Supercorp Zine.

_Once upon a time there were two little girls, one from the land, and the other from the sea..._

Kara looked up from the single line in her notebook, the end of her pencil tapping aimlessly against the page. The sun was setting. The rocky shelf jutting out from the cliffs over the ocean had been such a warm and inviting place to sit this morning, but now the rough gray stone was cooling rapidly under her butt. Time to go home. Book, pencil and discarded bits of paper went into her bag; a worn leather satchel passed down from Jeremiah to Alex and then to Kara. She swung the bag over her shoulder, tugged the cuffs of her sweater down over her wrists and began the long and treacherous climb back down to the beach.

She liked heights. Always had. Eliza used to joke there wasn't a tree in Midvale she hadn't dragged Kara out of at least once that first year she had come to live with them. After a broken arm and an embarrassing rescue by the fire department ( _up_ with one arm in a cast wasn't so bad, but _down_ was impossible,) she reluctantly gave up trees. The balcony outside her bedroom had offered a convenient route to the roof instead.

Rooftops had gotten her through highschool and college. Then there had been the old rusty fire escape barely clinging to the outside of her first apartment building. She took up rock climbing when she started working for Catco and stuck with it after she left the media empire to pursue a career in literature. She still hadn't found anything better for writer's block than the thrill of scaling a fifty foot wall.

Some people ran away from their problems, Kara ran _up._

Until one day there hadn't been anywhere high enough in National City. One day she needed _more._

So she packed a bag, booked a flight, said goodbye to friends and family and two weeks later found herself in Ireland with nothing but her empty notebooks and a suitcase full of clothes more suited to California than the early Irish Spring. Her parents had left her a cottage by the sea; small and shabby, it wasn't much, but it was somewhere she'd been happy when she was small. Eliza and Jeremiah had taken her and Alex there the first summer after they died, but they'd never gone back.

The tide was coming in.

Kara shivered, clinging more tightly to the cliff face as the rising waves lapped at her heels. She'd left her shoes and socks behind on the shore before climbing up to the shelf, and the water was colder than she remembered. Her toes were slowly going numb as she searched for another foothold, silently wishing for the security of a good pair of climbing gloves and a sturdy harness.

Later, she wouldn't remember slipping on the wet stone, or the shock of hitting her head on the rocks below. She did remember the water, a pair of dark eyes, the sleek slide of wet fur under her hands and a voice from far away and long ago, _It's okay. I've got you. You're safe,_ but that could have been the head injury.

_Once upon a time there were two little girls, one from the land, and the other from the sea. One of them was real, and the other was not. Or at least, that's what everybody said..._

When Kara opened her eyes again it was dark, or nearly dark. The sun had finished setting, but the soft yellow light peeking out from around the edge of an open door was enough to tell her where she was; tucked into bed in her own cottage. Someone had pulled her out of the water and brought her home, and from the faint sounds coming from the kitchen, that _someone_ was still here...

She sat up and immediately regretted it. She had a headache the size of boulder and her throat felt like she'd been gargling broken glass. Dropping her aching head into her hands, she drew in a ragged breath, held it, and then slowly let it out. The pain eased back into manageable levels.

Okay. Probable head injury, definite loss of consciousness and a good chance she'd swallowed enough seawater that whoever pulled her out had saved her life.

Fantastic.

After a bit of fumbling, she found her glasses on the bedside table. There was something tangled around the arms and it snagged on her fingers as she tried to unravel it. Tugging it free, she managed to get her glasses on and squinted down at the thin chain lying across her hands.

A necklace?

She held it up, letting the pendant hang free and gasped.

Her mother's necklace.

“I thought I lost this when I was a kid...” she whispered, her raw throat catching painfully on the quiet words.

“I kept it for you.”

Kara jerked her head up at the soft voice from the doorway, letting the necklace fall to the bed covers. “Who are you?”

The woman smiled, the flash of her teeth white in the dim light of the bedroom. “A friend, I think. Come on, your electricity is maddening, but I believe I've mastered it. I made you something called _soup_.”

Kara heard the words, but she couldn't quite fit them together in a way that made any sense. “Wait!” she struggled free of the heavy blankets, snatching up her mother's necklace and following the strange woman out of the room. The floor tilted alarmingly underneath her feet until she got her balance. She glanced down, realized that at some point her wet clothes had been traded for faded pineapple pajamas, and just... shelved that whole question for later.

“How did you know where I live?” she asked instead, stepping carefully though her cluttered living area. The cottage really only had four rooms; Two bedrooms, the bathroom and the big (for a given value of big) room, which was divided up into the kitchen, with it's mismatched, outdated appliances and a rickety wooden dining set, and the living area with one threadbare pull-out couch and an arm chair so soft it had threatened to swallow Kara whole on more than one occasion. There was also a coffee table that looked like it had started it's life as a fish-trap, and a bookshelf running all along one wall filled with an assortment of books, bits of driftwood, shells, sea glass and other things Kara hadn't tried to identify. She had, admittedly, added to the collection since moving in. Her own notebooks occupied the remaining flat surfaces. Most of them still empty.

“You showed it to me once,” the woman said, taking a bowl down out of the cupboard and filling it from a pot on the stove. A faint smell of char suggested this wasn't the first attempt. She nodded towards the table. “Sit.”

Kara sat. Mostly because she wasn't actually all that steady yet, but also because there was something about this woman that said she was used to getting her own way. She was both familiar, and utterly strange. The dark sweep of her hair seemed to have a life of it's own, the heavy waves falling over her shoulders like water, and the way she moved through Kara's kitchen made her think of sea birds gliding over the surface of the ocean. Her dress (robe? cape?) flowed with her. The shifting gray fabric looked like silk one moment and velvet the next, until she turned around to search through the drawers for a spoon, and Kara would have sworn there was a hood with fur and _ears_ and a soft wrinkled nose. She turned back again and it was just a dress. Her feet were bare. 

Kara rubbed her eyes. She must have hit her head harder than she thought. “I was conscious?” she asked, really hoping the answer was yes, because that would explain the pajamas.

“No.” The smile was back; a secret smile, just a little bit smug and a lot amused. “That was a long time ago.” She claimed the chair across from Kara and slid the food over to her. “You don't remember.” It was more of a statement than a question.

_Once upon a time there were two little girls, one of them remembered and the other one forgot._

Kara picked up the spoon. A chance reflection along the curve of the bowl suggested a smooth gray back cutting through the water. She remembered... something. Her mother's necklace was still in her other hand. She could feel the edges of the pendant pressing into her palm. Eliza had told her she'd lost it that last day on the beach. Kara remembered arguing with her, telling her a story... a story about another little girl who cried saltwater tears when Kara said goodbye.

“You weren't real...” she whispered, half-convinced she was still lying concussed on the beach somewhere and this was some kind of vivid hallucination. “They all said you weren't real... I made you up, I was grieving...”

One elegant black brow rose, the smile took on a hint of bared teeth. “I assure you, I am very real.”

“But you _can't_ be...” Kara dropped the spoon back onto the table with a clatter and stumbled up and out of the chair, ignoring the renewed throbbing between her ears. She closed her eyes, fingers pressed over her mouth, the hard line of the chain biting into her lips. She remembered... she remembered... she _couldn't_ remember...

An old fishing net lying in a heap on the sand, just out of the high water line, and something tangled up inside of it. Something alive.

_Once upon a time, there were two little girls, one in a net, and the other with a knife._

She had borrowed one of Eliza's paring knives. It had taken her an hour to saw through the tough netting and her hands had been red and swollen from the coarse fibers before she was finished. Somehow she had known not to ask anyone for help. All by herself she'd freed the young seal, the seal who was also a little girl, a little girl who had run away into the ocean, a little girl who came  _back._ She came back to play with Kara every day that summer, and every day the pain of losing her parents was a little easier to bear. 

Fingers closed around her wrists, gently pulling her hands away from her mouth. “It's okay, Kara.” 

Kara opened her eyes. “Lena...?”

Lena nodded, and now her smile spoke of something shared.

Kara opened her hands, taking one of Lena's, turning it over, and pressing the necklace into her palm. “I gave this to you,” she said wonderingly. “I said it was, I-”

“You said it was a promise. A promise that you were coming back,” Lena finished for her, lips curved in a teasing bow. “I waited.”

“I'm sorry.”

Lena tugged her closer, pressing their foreheads together over their clasped hands. “I know.”

The soup grew cold on the table while stories were told and new promises made. The lights in the little cottage were lit long into that night, and many, many nights after. The notebooks slowly filled up with words, and most days a sealskin hung on a peg by the door.

But not every day.

Lena didn't care for Alex at _all_ at first. The feeling was mutual. Kara gave up trying to stop her from taking her skin and hiding in the sea when her sister came to visit. There was nothing quite so humiliating as trying to argue with a seal while she spit seawater at you and gamboled through the waves, giving every appearance of having a marvelous time at your expense. They sorted it out eventually. Privately Kara was convinced Lena just didn't like anyone else having Kara all to themselves, and as a biologist, Alex's fascination with the unknown was ultimately too strong to resist. In the end they bonded over a mutual love of the ocean, and their devotion to Kara. 

Eliza and Jeremiah flew to Ireland for the wedding.

Lena found the whole custom rather funny, but she agreed for Kara's sake. They were married on the beach, and they danced under the moon.

_Once upon a time there were two little girls, one from the land, and the other from the sea. They fell in love and lived happily every after._

  
  



End file.
